FEATURES

Artizone Gourmet Food Comes Alive with Doug McGoldrick Photography

After a hard day‘s work, you just want to come home, relax, maybe watch a movie and eat good nutritious food without too much hassle. That’s where Artizone comes in. Artizone is a national gourmet food delivery company that has recently entered the Chicago market. There are lots of online food services out there now, so Artizone had to come up with a creative concept that would grab attention and customers.

The agency for their TV and print campaign was Tom, Dick and Harry (TDH) with Creative Director David Yang at the helm. TDH wanted to show Artizone’s food as being fresh and coming directly from the local artisans y to the customer in a fun way and eye catching way. The photographer they chose for the project was Chicago-based Doug McGoldrick. McGoldrick has been shooting in Chicago for ten years, doing a mix of advertising and corporate photography. He has an MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He had already done several jobs for TDH that included Bally’s fitness and Big Ten Network and has flair for a sense of fun even when there can be craziness on the set and in production. “We knew Doug had the experience of shooting in chaos but more importantly he would give everything 110%. We worked with him on a Bally Fitness job where TDH had to do a television and print shoot simultaneously. Doug at that time handled the print and he captured approximately 8,000 images over three days. When he turned over the files he also created an 8-minute stop motion video. Even though the client couldn't find a way to use it we knew it was a pretty cool technique and we would have to just table it,” explains CD Yang.

When the Artizone campaign came up, the stop motion just slapped them in the face and it had to be McGoldrick for the job. When they say they wanted Artizone to come alive, they were not kidding. The concept was to show how local artisan foods come running to your home. To cut through the clutter they wanted to come up with something simple, crazy and memorable.

McGoldrick's main challenge, believe it or not, was figuring out how to make a chicken run. “We really wanted to use a real chicken and not CGI, we went back and forth between shooting it on green screen and dropping it in, or shooting mostly just [the] chicken’s point of view for a while. We ended up using a combination of using a puppeted chicken and some point of view stuff like when the dog comes into the frame,” he explains. Geoff Binns-Calvey was the amazing prop guy who constructed a great rig to puppeteer the chicken around the city, and Cindy Melin was the food stylist. Everything was done in camera for the TV spots. The posters also were done in camera, except for the chicken who had its legs and arms digitally exaggerated and posed for a more dramatic effect.

McGoldrick shot with a Canon 5d Mark II for the TV spots. “The only lighting we used was bouncing and flagging, no other lighting, luckily the weather was on our side. We spent more time blocking the sun than waiting for the sun,” he says. For the posters, he used the same camera and combination of Profoto and Dynalight gear. The posters were shot on green for outlining.

The TV spots for Artizone are now running locally until the end of the year, mainly during local morning news shows on NBC and ABC. The posters are appearing all over town on Chicago bus shelters and subways. One of the great things about the project is that McGoldrick shot loads of extra poses of the chicken that are now being used on Instagram and twitter @runningchicken.

In the words of David Yang “it was Doug and done. You can’t get better words of praise than that from a satisfied client. You can see more of Doug McGoldrick’s prancing chickens and vegetables and gingerbread men at Artizone Chicago. See his site for more advertising and personal work and read his blog at www.dougphoto.com.